Why The U.S. Is Terrified That Huawei Controls The World's 5G Network - Technocracy News

Why The U.S. Is Terrified That
Huawei Controls The World’s
5G Network
With 29 billion connected devices by 2022, one security expert claims,
“Whoever gets to dominate 5G infrastructure will become the owner of
the next generation of the world’s telecoms infrastructure.” That
company is Huawei. ⁃ TN Editor
US lobbying against Chinese firm Huawei, one of the biggest phone
makers and telecommunications kit providers in the world, hit a new
level this week during the phone industry’s big annual conference.

Around 100,000 technology vendors, carriers, and device makers head to
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona every year both to strike deals and
to showcase emerging technologies. This year, the conversation was
dominated almost exclusively by 5G, as carriers look to introduce next-
generation, superfast mobile networks.

The conference was heavily sponsored by Huawei, as the firm made its
big pitch about its 5G capabilities.

But looming in the background were the months of negative press about
whether Huawei’s equipment might provide a backdoor that would allow

the Chinese government to spy on people.

The firm’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, is awaiting Canada’s
decision on whether to extradite her to the US, afteralleged sanctions
violations. And the company was also indicted by the US for alleged theft
of trade secrets.

Rotating chairman Guo Ping took to the stage on Tuesday morning to
talk up Huawei’s 5G business to a cavernous auditorium filled with
telecoms executives and journalists.

His speech took an unexpected turn about halfway through, when he
fired a shot at the US government, turning claims that Huawei spies on
behalf of China back on America.

“PRISM, PRISM on the wall, who is the most trustworthy of them all?”
Guo said onstage, in reference to the PRISM surveillance system used by
America’s intelligence agency. “Huawei has a strong track record in
security in three decades. Three billion people around the world. The US
security accusations of our 5G has no evidence, nothing.”

Behind him, a slide appeared in his presentation with the statement:
“Huawei has not and will never plant backdoors.” There was even some
muted laughter from the audience.

Elsewhere around the conference centre, Huawei’s logo adorned
lanyards of thousands of attendees, while ads for its Mate X foldable
phone greeted visitors as they entered the building.

Just five hours after Guo’s swipe, US government officials held a small
press conference to make their position on Huawei clear. Up until that
point, there had been no visible sign of the US government delegation,
which had quietly turned up to Mobile World Congress to lobby its
European allies not to use Huawei’s equipment in their networks.

Reading from a printed statement, with no microphone or slides, top US
cyber official Robert Strayer said: “The United States is asking other
governments and the private sector to consider the threat posed by
Huawei and other Chinese information technology companies.”

When pressed by reporters, Strayer refused to say whether the US had
proof that Huawei might have built backdoors into its
telecommunications equipment.

And asked if the US might simply be worried about leaning too heavily
on a foreign tech company, Strayer said: “Really I think the question is
this: Do you want to have a system that is potentially compromised by
the Chinese government or would you rather go with a more secure
alternative?”

The US will be hoping that Strayer’s comments, and its behind-the-
scenes lobbying, will land more effectively with its allies than Huawei’s
attack on the big stage at MWC.

Huawei upped the ante in its fight with the US over its
telecommunication devices on Thursday local time, announcing that it
filed a lawsuit against the US government, which has banned its federal
agents from using the equipment, citing privacy concerns.

Read full story here…

Analysis: The Benefits Of
Technocracy In China
This is an excellent and scholarly article on Technocracy in China. Note
that it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission,
who brought China and its premier, Deng Xiaoping, out of its dark ages
in 1978. This is where China’s Technocracy sprung forth. ⁃ TN Editor

Since the Reform and Opening initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, any
casual observer of China’s leaders might note how many of them were
educated as engineers. Indeed, at the highest level, former presidents
Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013) as well as Xi Jinping
(2013–present) all studied engineering, although Xi subsequently did
academic work in management and law. And an engineering influence
exists not only at the very top. A high proportion of government officials
at city, provincial, and national levels have had some form of technical
education. For example, of the 20 government ministries that form the
State Council, more than half are headed by persons who have
engineering degrees or engineering work experience. As a result,
foreign analysts have suggested for some time that China functions as a
kind of technocracy—a nation run by people who are in power because
of their technical expertise—and have often criticized it as such. This
assessment reflects a common Western view that technocratic
governance is inherently anti-democratic and even dehumanizing.

But what does technocracy mean today, especially in China? Given
China’s remarkable emergence in recent decades as a vibrant player on
the world economic and political stage, might technocracy in the
Chinese context have some positive characteristics?

To understand technocracy in China, one must first have a sense of
historical context and above all an understanding of the cultural impact
of a series of devastating military humiliations—the Opium Wars of the
1840s and 1860s, in which, in the name of free trade, China was forced
to allow the importation of opium and the Summer Palace was sacked;
an 1895 war in which Russia captured the Liaodong Peninsula and Japan

took Taiwan, the Penghu Islands, and eventually Korea; and the 1899
Boxer Uprising against Christian missionaries, to which Great Britain,
France, the United States, Japan, and Russia all responded by looting
and raping in Tianjin, Beijing, and elsewhere. In reaction to these
defeats, Chinese intellectuals turned the Qing Dynasty thinker Wei
Yuan’s injunction “to learn from the West to defeat the West” into a
social movement motto. Early Republic of China attempts to learn from
the West actually involved the conscious importation of technocratic
ideas by the Nanjing government. A number of Chinese who studied in
the United States during the 1920s returned home influenced by
American technocratic ideals of such figures as Thorsten Veblen and
Howard Scott. One example is Luo Longji, who studied at Columbia
University from 1922–1923 and returned to China to publish a number of
articles arguing for what he called “expert politics,” his term for
technocracy. Luo subsequently founded the China Democratic League,
which remains one of the eight non-Communist political parties
represented in the National People’s Congress.

Initially, however, all attempts to learn from the West had to struggle
against internal political disorder (the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911
and a resulting long-term civil war) and renewed invasion by Japan (from
1931 to 1945, through which China endured the brunt of the World War
II Pacific Theater). When Mao Zedong and the Communists won the civil
war and on October 1, 1949, declared the People’s Republic, political
consolidation and technical development vied with each other for
priority.

For the next quarter century, until Mao’s death in 1976, the purity of
redness often trumped technical engineering competence. The disaster
of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) was caused by ignoring
technological expertise, especially about agriculture, and the Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976) closed many universities in the name of learning
from the peasants. The Reform and Opening that began two years after
Mao’s death naturally became an opportunity to rehabilitate expertise,
both engineering and economic. In policies influenced by the successful
development pathways pursued by technocratic regimes in Singapore,
South Korea, and Taiwan, the new paramount leader, Deng, moved

engineers into critical government positions. Hu Yaobang, as Party
Chairman (1981–1982) and General Secretary of the Communist Party
(1982–1987), further proposed that all leading government personnel be
trained technical specialists. The technocratic practice of scientific
management, which Vladimir Lenin had declared as exploitative under
capitalism but beneficial under socialism, offered a bridge between
engineering and economics.

The Varieties of Technocracy
Before discussing what technocracy has come to mean in China today, I
want to first step back to briefly explore how the term has come to be
understood in the Western intellectual tradition. In one of the few
empirical studies of technocracy, political scientist Robert Putnam
defines technocrats as persons “who exercise power by virtue of their
technical knowledge” and describes the “technocratic mentality” in
terms of five key characteristics:

       Confidence that social problems can be solved by scientific or
       technological means.
       Skepticism or hostility toward politicians and political
       institutions.
       Little sympathy for the openness and equality of democracy.
       A preference for pragmatic over ideological or moral
       assessments of policy alternatives.
       Strong commitment to technological progress in the form of
       material productivity, without concern for questions of
       distributive or social justice.

Putnam’s 1977 study further distinguishes between two types of
technocrats: those with engineering technical knowledge versus those
with economic technical knowledge—noting that the two groups diverge
with regard to characteristics three, four, and five. Economic
technocrats were more likely than engineering technocrats to grant
importance to politics and equality and to be more interested in issues of
social justice.

In a recent revisiting of the comparison, Richard Olson’s Scientism and

Technocracy in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Scientific
Management (2016) suggests that subsequent decades have witnessed
something of a reversal. Engineering education has called increasing
attention to social contexts that take politics and social justice seriously,
while economics has become more quantitative and less concerned with
social issues.

Neither author notes, however, the significant roles played in all modern
societies by what could be called limited or sectoral technocracies.
Technical knowledge is a basis for power that democratic societies
willingly grant: for example, by delegating authority to the military,
physicians, and civil engineers. At the same time, such societies may
bitterly contest technocratic authority with regard to evolutionary
biologists, agricultural researchers, and climate scientists.

Such distinctions help make clear what is really at stake in concerns
about technocracy. In short, governance by technical experts and
governance employing such principles as those of scientific management
are not the same. When exercising political power, technical elites such
as engineers and economists may also use the authority of their
expertise to advance positions or policies that are not simply technical.
In doing so they can easily ride roughshod over the interests of those
they are supposed to serve, and in the process use their expertise to
preserve their own political interests.

In Western developed countries, technocracy has thus been subject to
multiple criticisms. Marxists attack technocracy for helping capitalism
control workers. Humanists claim technocracy turns humans into
machines. Libertarians criticize technocracy as encroaching on
individual freedom. Historicists and relativists criticize scientific
principles and technological methods for not adapting to human society.

Yet advanced techno-scientific society depends crucially on some level of
technocratic governance. City mayors cannot provide safe water systems
without asking engineers to design them. Governors cannot promote
regional disease prevention and healthcare without medical and public
health professionals; they cannot reduce environmental pollution without
technical experts to monitor air and water quality. Heads of government

would not even know about the ozone hole and global climate change
without scientific advisers. The progressive deployment of technocratic
elites in the practices of governance, even when under the supervision of
non-technocratic elites, is a critical feature of all social orders today.

Maybe the fact that some form of technocracy is one of the basic
characteristics of contemporary politics is a reason it is so often
criticized. There is certainly some sense in which contemporary politics
is characterized by a kind of universal resentment against the
unintended consequences of a techno-scientific world that, along with all
of its benefits, seems to be depriving us of traditional solaces and
stabilities.

Read full story here…

Why You Should Be Worried
About Machines Reading Your
Emotions
Reading emotions is akin to phrenology, or reading the bumps on your
head to predict mental traits. Both are based on simplistic and faulty
assumptions which could falsely scar an individual for life. ⁃ TN Editor
Could a program detect potential terrorists by reading their facial
expressions and behavior? This was the hypothesis put to the test by the
US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in 2003, as it began
testing a new surveillance program called the Screening of Passengers
by Observation Techniques program, or Spot for short.

While developing the program, they consulted Paul Ekman, emeritus
professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Decades earlier, Ekman had developed a method to identify minute
facial expressions and map them on to corresponding emotions. This
method was used to train “behavior detection officers” to scan faces for
signs of deception.

But when the program was rolled out in 2007, it was beset with
problems. Officers were referring passengers for interrogation more or
less at random, and the small number of arrests that came about were
on charges unrelated to terrorism. Even more concerning was the fact
that the program was allegedly used to justify racial profiling.

Ekman tried to distance himself from Spot, claiming his method was
being misapplied. But others suggested that the program’s failure was
due to an outdated scientific theory that underpinned Ekman’s method;
namely, that emotions can be deduced objectively through analysis of
the face.

In recent years, technology companies have started using Ekman’s
method to train algorithms to detect emotion from facial expressions.
Some developers claim that automatic emotion detection systems will

not only be better than humans at discovering true emotions by
analyzing the face, but that these algorithms will become attuned to our
innermost feelings, vastly improving interaction with our devices.

But many experts studying the science of emotion are concerned that
these algorithms will fail once again, making high-stakes decisions about
our lives based on faulty science.

Emotion detection technology requires two techniques: computer vision,
to precisely identify facial expressions, and machine learning algorithms
to analyze and interpret the emotional content of those facial features.

Typically, the second step employs a technique called supervised
learning, a process by which an algorithm is trained to recognize things
it has seen before. The basic idea is that if you show the algorithm
thousands and thousands of images of happy faces with the label
“happy” when it sees a new picture of a happy face, it will, again,
identify it as “happy”.

A graduate student, Rana el Kaliouby, was one of the first people to start
experimenting with this approach. In 2001, after moving from Egypt to
Cambridge University to undertake a PhD in computer science, she
found that she was spending more time with her computer than with
other people. She figured that if she could teach the computer to
recognize and react to her emotional state, her time spent far away from
family and friends would be less lonely.

Kaliouby dedicated the rest of her doctoral studies to work on this
problem, eventually developing a device that assisted children with
Asperger syndrome read and respond to facial expressions. She called it
the “emotional hearing aid”.

In 2006, Kaliouby joined the Affective Computing lab at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where together with the lab’s
director, Rosalind Picard, she continued to improve and refine the
technology. Then, in 2009, they co-founded a startup called Affectiva,
the first business to market “artificial emotional intelligence”.

Read full story here…